I'm reading these race guides on Donovan's. And pretty much every single guide says something like:

"if you find a native world, drop X number of colonists and Y number of supplies. If there are no natives, drop A colonists and B supplies. If there are worms, move on"

But the thing is, as far as I know there is no way to determine whether there are natives on a planet before you colonise it (save Bioscanners of course). So, am I missing something? Is there some button I failed to push?? Or is nearly everyone who wrote a race guide smoking crack?

Oh wait, wait, so I take a look at one of my games, and apparently the Starchart will show you natives on an uncolonised world?? (at 2x view or greater only) Odd that this information to me doesn't show up anywhere else whatsoever. Is there some other button I'm missing somewhere???

I use Winplan btw oh and until about last week I never ever looked at the map at anything other than 1x zoom.

On the ship and planet screens, there is a button that is a white circle with red dots in it called the "Planetary Survey". When you click on it, it gives you some important info... It allows you to scan the mineral quantity and density on planets you own (planet screen) or have a ship in orbit over (ship screen). It also tells you temperature, natives and colonist concentrations, government type and how many mines are active on the planet. The final info is the f-code of the planet. This is useful when you need to beam up fuel from unowned planets or Amorph planets...

This button works on your planets and unowned planets. It doesn't work on planets owned by someone else if they have built a defense post.

Recommend you spend some time reading through the Help pages so info like this doesn't slip past you. You're missing a lot of key info if you miss this...

EV is more an information tool. It saves all sorts of tid bits and displays it for you in lots of different ways. It will also allow you to advance turns and show you what is likely to happen given the information it has to work with. Not to mention I think the map has many more uses then the standard WinPlan one.

What it does NOT do is let you actually do your turn (ie ship moves, planet builds, etc) and then make a turn file ready to send. But it's ability to remember data (eg. plot the movements of enemy ships you see in space only every second or third turn) from turn one and then let you go back at any time and see it all again can be invaluable.

Advantage of VPA is being able to do your turn with VPA.
Disadvantage of VPA, is its ugly as sin, crappy DOS Program, and not very intuitive.

Echoview, is much easier to use, easier on the eyes, lots more custom settings, works perfectly with Randmax for planet settings. Love the 20 turn forcaster, and 20 turn history, for ships and planets.
Phost game, simple autocontrol, and alliance setups. As a good tholian, using the forcaster, current turn Ship is building torps(mkt), and minesweeping, use next turn, I can change the mission to lay mines and adjust ship FC for websize, very useful on front lines and multiple ships, for building proper concentric web fields.

Disadvantage to Echoview, is you use it to just to see, and predict.
All ship movements,Builds, and SB functions have to be done in Winplan.
Planet autobuilds are done through RandMax(well for me nowadays),

Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference.
The US Marines don't have that problem.
President Ronald Reagan

Shardin5 wrote:Advantage of VPA is being able to do your turn with VPA.
Disadvantage of VPA, is its ugly as sin, crappy DOS Program, and not very intuitive.

VPA is beautiful and the peak of VGAP precision! You want crappy, switch to Tim's DOS version or even Winplan.

Shardin5 wrote:Echoview, is much easier to use, easier on the eyes, lots more custom settings, works perfectly with Randmax for planet settings. Love the 20 turn forcaster, and 20 turn history, for ships and planets.
Phost game, simple autocontrol, and alliance setups. As a good tholian, using the forcaster, current turn Ship is building torps(mkt), and minesweeping, use next turn, I can change the mission to lay mines and adjust ship FC for websize, very useful on front lines and multiple ships, for building proper concentric web fields.

Disadvantage to Echoview, is you use it to just to see, and predict.
All ship movements,Builds, and SB functions have to be done in Winplan.
Planet autobuilds are done through RandMax(well for me nowadays),

Shardin5 wrote:Advantage of VPA is being able to do your turn with VPA.
Disadvantage of VPA, is its ugly as sin, crappy DOS Program, and not very intuitive.

Echoview, is much easier to use, easier on the eyes, lots more custom settings, works perfectly with Randmax for planet settings. Love the 20 turn forcaster, and 20 turn history, for ships and planets.
Phost game, simple autocontrol, and alliance setups. As a good tholian, using the forcaster, current turn Ship is building torps(mkt), and minesweeping, use next turn, I can change the mission to lay mines and adjust ship FC for websize, very useful on front lines and multiple ships, for building proper concentric web fields.

Disadvantage to Echoview, is you use it to just to see, and predict.
All ship movements,Builds, and SB functions have to be done in Winplan.
Planet autobuilds are done through RandMax(well for me nowadays),

While I've become a VPA convert, I will admit that Echoview makes certain things easier / purtier. Which is why I say... why does it have to be a choice? I run both at once, do most of the work in VPA, but predicting/quick map overview/etc I'll flip over to Echoview.

Both are useful.
I started playing in nothing but PHOST games, back on the Battlestar Command site. Echoview made PHOST learning and using PHOST functions to easy. Customizing the Race and mineral colors, displaying what I want on the map, in easy to see colors and labels has made Echoview useful, now that I have become a Randmax Fan, EchoView is super useful.
I use the colors you see on the Autotroll graph for the Race colors,I see Green I know its a Bird ship, white Fed and so on, as well as the mine fields, seeing a bunch of Red, black and white just doesn't mean much to me. Nice little battle sim is included, allows for all sorts of combinations, helpful when you want to build to kill or Capture. StarDock, is useful, fleet summary's, those Large Meteor Impacts, all tracked with History.
Only drawback, and its a big one, is you can't do your turn IN IT. It does make doing your turn, just the way you want it useful

Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference.
The US Marines don't have that problem.
President Ronald Reagan